Category: Music

Posted without comment (and as found on Facebook)

When both Spiritualized and Spectrum play the same venue nine days apart it’s dead easy to draw up all kinds of coincidence and irony parallels. Hell, the music crit review basically writes itself. However if there’s any kind of comparison to look for it’s how Sonic and Jason have both dealt with that long hazy shadow of Spacemen 3 – now seventeen years in the past.

After years of shows with just him and maybe an occasional guitarist, Sonic has a full-band version of Spectrum again. As usual, I’ll patiently await the full album but in the meantime it’s great to hear these songs again. I forget just how brutal of a rhythm guitarist Sonic is.

Some YouTube clips:

“How You Satisfy Me” (yes it was that dark in the club)

“Revolution”

“Suicide”

After years of adding and subtracting band members, Jason finally has a lean version of Spiritualized that sounds great without the overkill of previous full-band tours. Perhaps best of all, Jason was positively chatty (which means saying “thank you” twice) during the show. Songs In A&E is a terrific album. It seems like Jason has finally assembled something that hits just the right elements of skeletal, noise, and over the top excess. Some of the songs remind me of Spacemen 3’s The Perfect Prescription – “Yeah Yeah” and “You Lie You Cheat sound like they could have come out “Things’ll Never Be The Same” rehearsals and “Baby I’m Just A Fool” could very well be a 2008 take of “Walkin’ With Jesus” if it wasn’t for the completely unexpected THIRD chord instead of the usual two.

“Come Together”

“Lord Can You Hear Me”

Sigh 🙁… Terribly underrated, Wright was largely responsible for why my favorite band is my favorite band and by indirect connection why music means so much as it does to me. I guess no one outside of his family knew that he was ill.

I suppose it’s appropriate that his last appearance was singing “Arnold Layne” at the Syd tribute concert last year. Everything full circle?

UPDATE: Ned articulates much better than I can.

Twenty-three years ago I ran across an album called Revenge Of The Prisoners by some paisley-looking bunch of Brits called The Prisoners. Any band naming themselves after my favorite cult TV show was well worth the five bucks for the LP and I wasn’t disappointed. At all. Amazingly gritty sound full of attitude – all of 1966 coming at you at 200mph. Too full-on for mere revivalism. The band fell apart a couple years later (though reforming on occasion) and lead singer/guitarist Graham Day continued on with the equally as furious Solarflares.

The Solarflares disbanded in 2004 and since then I hadn’t heard anything from Day until out of idle curiosity I searched on him and found that he had a new band: Graham Day & The Gaolers. One album, Soundtrack To The Daily Grind, was released last year and there’s an EP out soon.

Here’s “Glad I’m Not Young.” Welcome back!

I’ll have a post-Terrastock core dump here shortly but here’s a couple things in the meantime…

I programmed episode 15 of the Deconstruction Podcast and it was just posted over the weekend. The podcast is worth a listen… I tried to limit myself here to more recent pop stuff that’s been released within the past three years. As usual things take a left turn midway through and that 7% Solution track breaks the rule (it’s from 1996) but I like how it turned out.

Track listing is:

1. The Morning After Girls – “Run For Our Lives”
2. Asobi Seksu – “New Years”
3. Airiel – “Thrown Idols”
4. The Oohlas – “Gone”
5. Persephone’s Bees – “Muzika Dlya Fil’ma”
6. Hooverphonic – “Stranger”
7. Goldenhorse – “The Last Train”
8. The Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound – “The Morning Maiden”
9. Mahogany – “Tesselation, Formerly Plateau One”
10. Emily Loizeau – “L’autre Bout Du Monde”
11. The Lovetones – “Everybody Hides Away”
12. Telenovela – “Breakfast With Birds”
13. The High Violets – “Xstacy”
14. 7% Solution – “The Road And The Common”
15. Ed Kuepper & The Kowalski Collective – “Miracles”

Episode 15 link. RSS feed for the podcast.

Years ago I helped briefly on Fire Records’ Chamber Music project and after a long gestation it’s finally about to be released. NPR interviews producer James Nichols and discusses the project.

Terrastock VII is taking place in Louisville, Kentucky this weekend so, as always, if you see any befuddled-looking underground music types in the nation’s airports, give ‘em a break.

I’ll be there for all four days so say hello if you’re going also (and happen to be reading this). See you on the other side.

Ned Raggett tags me with the following blog meme that’s been making the rounds:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

So here we go…

1. Edith Nylon – “Edith Nylon”
1979 French new wave with all of the requisite elements for fantastic new wave: shouty vocals, insistent bass/drums, a synthesizer that does nothing else except announce it’s presence, a guitar line good enough to carry the whole song, vague title/band name reference to synthetic material (think Plastique Bertrand, Poly Styrene, The Age Of Plastic, etc.). Sometimes attitude is indeed good enough.

2. Swervedriver – “Duel”
I fished out Raise and Mezcal Head once word of the reunion tour leaked out and I revise my earlier estimate. “Duel” is now objectively 72% more awesome than I originally remember it being (originally I had this pegged at 62% more awesome when the Juggernaut Rides compilation was released two years back). And for me, Swerve is the kind of band that deserves to be measured in units of “awesome!” “Duel” is my favorite song of theirs by far – you think it’s going one way and then it shifts into another song and then back again. Bonus points for the chiming major-key guitar riff during the “I’m going down, down to the marketplace” chorus. (Video from last month’s show here in LA)

3. Motörhead – “We Are The Road Crew (instrumental)”
A couple months back I stumbled across the VH-1 Classic Albums episode on Ace Of Spades. No further word is necessary here, but there’s an extra from the DVD that made it onto YouTube – a semi-reunion (Clarke is in a different studio and effectively pasted in here) of the Lemmy, Clarke, and Taylor line-up who blast through “We Are The Road Crew” as an instrumental.

4. The Long Blondes – “Nostalgia”
Couples has a bucket full of “difficult second album” clichés, but when I saw them last week they are as furious live as Hanley/Scanlon-era Fall. Obvious pick would be the skittery Can-meets-P.I.L. “Round The Hairpin” but I’m going with “Nostalgia.” This is to 2008 what the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” was to 2004. At least it should be.

5. Bo Diddley – “I Don’t Like You”
This 5:25 clip is as important to civilization as the discovery of fire, but the first thing I thought of was this track from the utterly insane The Black Gladiator album where Bo reconstitutes himself as a Sly Stone-style funk monster (Dave Alvin’s “The Night Bo Diddley Banned The Beat” is far more instructive rememberance than any of the other pieces last week). The Beat isn’t here, but Bo summons up a wailing howl worthy of Screaming Jay Hawkins before launching into a raunchy version of Booker T. & The MGs.

6. Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – “Radio Waves”
Yes I did just pick up the new reissue of this. Uncomfortably sandwiched in between their New Wave singles and subsequent John Hughes pop, Dazzle Ships was the outsider album of 1983. “Radio Waves” is the best combination of collapsing circuity and flat out new wave, but you’re never really sure which part of the song is going to take the lead. Producer Rhett Davies should get a little credit for egging OMD on with this. He produced all those Brian Eno albums as well as The B-52’s Wild Planet and Dazzle Ships is the best possible amalgamation of that. Still my most favorite Peter Saville album cover too.

7. Holly & The Italians – “Rock Against Romance”
It’s a fantastically great song. Skip ahead to the 2:40 mark here and go nuts.

That’s it. I’m tagging these folks to carry on the meme.

• Highway 62
• Faris McReynolds
• Doug Orleans
• Everyday Literacies
• Jonsonblog
• Westward Ho!
• Rotting America